Thursday, 5 March 2015

Cheap Carts & other bits and bobs

Like all Wargamers I like a bargain, so in this short post let me show you how you can add carts to your battlefield for just a few pounds. Lets face it the ones out there on the market are expensive !

Over the last couple of years I have been buying Lledo vans and cars for my VBCW project. In fact I probably own more toy cars now than when I was a child. However a few weeks ago I discovered that Lledo produced a range of brewers carts (also known as Drays).

I was fortunate to purchase six of these in an auction on ebay for just a few quid plus postage - six wagons for £10. This was a bit of a punt but I reckoned that I could always give these away if they were not fit for purpose.

Lets examine the cart - they all come die cast, with two plastic horses, some plastic barrels and a driver.

With 28mm mini for scale puposes

All great materials which could be used for...

Drivers - they are seated wearing bowler hats perfect for drivers of my vans and seated at stations etc. They are almost in 28mm scale. Indeed you could also cut these and with a bit of a conversion use them as tank crew.

Barrels - lets turn them into terrain scatter

Horses - too small for 28mm but with a bit of jiggery pokery I could use them as small pack mules or pit ponies. With 12 available a string of mules might look fun - I would of course need to add the packs etc...

Defintely too small

The cart - obviously a cart - used through out the ages.

I stripped down all the components.

Added a balsa wood base to inside of the cart

Primed it grey

Painted the cart

Job done

All this took less than 15 minutes excluding drying time...I'll post up what I do with all the bits in another post

My five remaining carts

So if you want to echo my project head off to ebay and look for lledo brewery drays - search for the bulk buys NOT the singles